Networking architectures have grown increasingly complex in telecommunications environments. The ever-increasing need to communicate in and across various network environments has caused many networking systems to respond by adding enhancements to accommodate the increase in networking traffic and to accommodate various types of network traffic.
MPLS networks may provide unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based and packet-switching end users. Packet-switching services require that the MPLS network offer very specific treatment to the packets which belong to a specific Application Session. The specific treatment may be specified in terms of bandwidth, latency, jitter, probability of losing a data packet, etc. In some cases, network operators may employ packet networks in which application layer signaling devices, such as session border controllers (SBCs), function as an overlay network, with no explicit coordination with the operation of the packet routers in the network. SBCs control the signaling and the data streams involved in establishing, conducting, and terminating a call session within a communication network. Each session may include one or more call signaling streams to control the call and one or more call media streams to carry the call's audio, video, or other related data. SBCs generally use media relays in order to provide virtual private network interconnect, network address translation traversal, topology hiding, and other known functionalities. SBCs may be inserted into the signaling and media streams between the originating and the receiving parties in a call session so that the SBC may control the signaling traffic and the media traffic of the session. Routers, within an MPLS network, serve as entry and exit points to the network. The router may be a label edge router (LER), which may be configured to push a label on an incoming data packet and pop off a label of an outgoing data packet. In another embodiment, the label edge router may be coupled to an intermediate-level router, referred to as a label switch router (LSR). The LSR may be configured to perform routing of the data packet based on the label associated with the data packet.
The traffic engineering extension of MPLS, known as MPLS-TE, generally allows the establishment of MPLS tunnels, taking into consideration the network constraints and requirements. MPLS-TE includes certain functionality configured to dynamically adapt to the requirements of an application once a call session is already established. In a general application, MPLS-TE provides guaranteed bandwidth and general network performance management to the end user of the network. However, MPLS-TE does not provide for an application to dynamically establish and manage an MPLS tunnel. Accordingly, the ability to provide an effective system and method to i) dynamically establish an MPLS tunnel, ii) manage the tunnel's performance and associated resources, iii) dynamically dimension the tunnel according to the needs of an application, and iv) terminate the MPLS tunnel upon conclusion by an application offers a significant challenge to a communication network.